Planning a Family History Trip

The weather is cooling down, the Fall decorations are going up, and the Pumpkin Spice fairies have returned turning lattes everywhere a shade of orange. It's also the perfect time for a short road trip, a chance to stretch our travel legs after a long year and a half cooped up since COVID took center stage. So what's a genealogist to do, but plan a family history trip!?

I've been meaning to visit Halifax County, Virginia, for years now. It's the place a quarter of my family lived for generations, and yet it remains something of an enigma to me. So I went ahead and made a plan, and I'm heading to Halifax this weekend for a short but much needed trip. 

How can you plan a family history trip? Come along with me as I share what I've done to prepare to visit the land of my ancestors!

Get your bearings

Before we can plan any trip, we have to get our bearings - to discover the place we're going to see. There are several ways we can do that, but I start with Google Maps. 

When you search for a county on Google Maps, the county outline will appear on the map. This is great because it helps us see the boundaries of the county. In the case of Halifax County, there's a lot to see and explore! So to make it more manageable, I've saved important spots as I've discovered them.

Here, you can see where I've selected an important location in my family's story, Ingram Christian Church. To save a location to your map, you just select "save" next to directions. I've made a list called "Halifax" for myself, which you can see above.

You'll want to figure out how far your destination is from home - Halifax is a 3 hour drive - so I'll have to leave early in the morning. I found a convenient (and super affordable) place on airbnb, which I would definitely recommend. Next, it's planning where to go!

Taking time for research

For Virginia research, I'm spoiled with the Library of Virginia whose resources are seemingly endless. But there are special sources that are only available on the ground in local courthouses, community archives, libraries, and museums. So before any genealogy trip, we need to discover where these locations are, their hours and accessibility, and what can only be discovered on site. We need to check out what we already have on our ancestors and where there are holes in our research. 

Along with getting our bearings for our trip, we should discover the history and resources available for the place we're going. Wikipedia is a great first stop for history and context of a new place. For example, I can learn that Halifax County had just barely 36,000 people in 2010. It's still a very rural place! 

Next, we should always look at the FamilySearch wiki. For Halifax County, we can see what records are available for research there as well as history that's relevant for our search. It's always important to check out the parent county from which our focus location was formed. Halifax was formed in 1752 from Lunenburg County, which had been formed in 1745 from Brunswick County. You can track the genealogy of Virginia counties (or any state's counties for that matter) over at the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries Project from the Newberry Library. Aside from being an amazing resource, it's tons of fun to use their interactive maps.

My plan includes stopping at these important locations:

• Halifax County Circuit Court
• Genealogy and Research Center at the South Boston – Halifax County Museum of Fine Arts and History
• Chaffin House at the Halifax County Historical Society

There's only so much I can do in one day, and I also want to see all that Halifax has to offer. So I have to make a plan to see the places my ancestors would have known!

Seeing the sights

A family history trip is much more than a research trip. We can do research in so many places these days, but its a rare treat to walk where our ancestors walked. I have a few places I know I have to visit while I'm in Halifax.

I love cemeteries, y'all! I've written before how we can seek ancestors in cemeteries, so no family history trip would be complete without a cemetery trip (or two or three!) With ancestors from two sides of my family from Halifax, I have a lot of cemeteries to seek out. We can find cemeteries on Find a Grave but we can also discover these important places in our ancestors' records. Death certificates are the easiest place to find cemetery names and locations for our family members since the 20th century.

If your family lived in cities, you can find their addresses in city directories and on the U.S. census. This is a fun way to visit our ancestral homes and to see the places that cultivated our family in the past. My mom's grandfather was from South Boston in Halifax, a quaint town of about 8,000 people. My grandmother remembers her great-aunts and great-uncle who lived together unmarried into old age in South Boston. I found the home on Google Maps, saved it to my list, and I'm looking forward to sending a photo to my grandmother. 

I'll also visit the location where my ancestor Meades Anderson formed Meadville in 1787. The town diminished over the years, but the name still can be found on street, church, and school names in the area. 

And don't worry, y'all! I'll try to have some fun too. The Halifax Chamber of Commerce has a list of things to do, and Halifax County tourism has a list too! If only I had a few weeks to see and do it all...

*****

Planning a family history trip should be fun. It's a chance to discover what we know and what we don't yet know about our ancestral homelands. In this case, my homeland is a three-hour drive from home. It's a place filled with the sights and sounds my great-grandfathers knew well and which I have yet to discover for myself. Well, that all changes this Friday! Stay tuned for the story of Sam in Halifax!

Have you planned a family history trip before? Will you be planning one for this Fall or Winter?

Your ancestors deserve the best researcher, the most passionate story-teller, and the dignity of being remembered. So let's encounter your ancestors through family history and remember the past made present today!

Digging Deeper to Find Missing Records

When I was little, one of my favorite things to do outside was to dig holes. Deep holes! Holes that might eventually lead to China, even! In my backyard, my friend Ben and I would compete to see whose hole was deeper. During elementary school, I would dig in the playground sand until I hit that beautiful Virginia clay I could make things out of. And when I went to the beach, I would dig until I hit water.

As determined as I was as a child, am I as determined with the holes in my genealogy research? Have I left any research question shallow and forgotten? Where might I return to take my research just a bit deeper?

Well, guess what, y'all? I found a hole in my research recently and it was a great learning opportunity for me. I was *so* sure that a marriage record for a particular couple simply didn't exist. Or, if it did, it was in a different state. 

But then I found that marriage record! How could it be so? I had written *two* research reports about this couple, and still hadn't found that elusive record. What changed?

When we are working on a research question, our goal should be to search in all the available places to find the evidence we need to answer that question. We need to nurture a critical eye, we need to be thorough, and we need to know WHERE to look.

In my search for a particular marriage record, I had a few pieces of information that could help me:

• The man was single in 1920 and a widower in 1930.
• The woman died in 1926 in Richmond, Virginia.
• The man lived in Powhatan County, Virginia, in 1920 and in Chesterfield County, Virginia, in 1930.
• The woman was born - according to her husband as the informant on her death certificate - in North Carolina.
• I had both people's whole names - but the surnames are unfortunately very common.

Where would you search first for the marriage record? Here were my thoughts:

• Powhatan or Chesterfield County, Virginia - where the man lived before and after.
• Richmond City, Virginia - where the woman died.
• North Carolina or even South Carolina (where the woman's parents were possibly from).

Where had I looked?

• In person - Powhatan County marriage register book
• Online - Ancestry databases
• U.S., Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999
• Virginia, U.S., Extracted Vital Records, 1660-1923
• Virginia, U.S., Select Marriages, 1785-1940

Helpful resources that wouldn't help this case because of years covered:

• Virginia, U.S., Marriage Records, 1700-1850
• Virginia, U.S., Marriage Records, 1936-2014

I searched all of these databases, but they are only that - databases. The marriage record images for later years are available on Ancestry, but not for the years between 1920 and 1930. Where might I find a marriage record in Chesterfield or Richmond? The Library of Virginia lists available records on their microfilm. These microfilm are accessible at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, and they're viewable on computers. This helps researchers who can then save images to a flash drive. 

• Chesterfield marriages 1853-1935 on Reel 12
• Richmond City marriages for the 1920s are in three reels at Library of Virginia
• Reel 71, 1916-1920
• Reel 72, 1920-1925
• Reel 73, 1925-1934

Great news, right!? They're available at LVA! But guess what, folks? I didn't search these microfilm. I made the mistake we might all fall into sometimes in earlier stages in our research. We assume if we didn't find it before, we must have searched all of these resources. 

The researcher we are today isn't the same researcher as we were yesterday. Today, we have more experience!

So what did I do? I first checked to see if those marriage records were accessible online at FamilySearch. There I found this database collection:

• Virginia, Bureau of Vital Statistics, County Marriage Registers, 1853-1935

But that must be the same database as the ones available on Ancestry right? I mean, they share so many records with Ancestry... Don't assume, y'all! Just don't do it. Because guess what I found after a simple search in that collection? The index to their marriage in 1922 in Richmond, Virginia! 

We should never stop at an online index. We need to view the actual record - if at all possible. In this case, the Richmond City marriage register is on microfilm and is digitized by FamilySearch; it's accessible, though, only at a Family History Center or an Affiliate Library. Luckily, I have an Affiliate Library 10 minutes from my work. 

So I took a trip to that library and now I have a digital image of their entry in the Richmond City marriage register from 1922! I just need to see if the original marriage certificate is available. That might have additional details not available on the marriage register.

Lessons

1. Dig deeper. Think you already looked there? Well, you should have a research log that tells you if you looked there already. If not, start keeping a research log of where and when you looked for a record.
2. Discover what's out there. You can't know what you don't know. If you don't know the available databases, available microfilm, or digitized records...you can't know where to search or browse for records.
3. Sometimes records DO exist. Sometimes they don't. But the fact that you haven't found them *yet* doesn't mean they're not waiting to be found.
4. Don't ASSUME. Just don't do it, y'all! I assumed in this case and it cost me time and frustration.

*****

Family history and genealogy research takes determination. It takes the focus and concentration of a 6-year-old boy from Chesterfield County on a quest to make it to China. It takes the humility of a child too to know when to admit that we haven't looked everywhere, just yet. 

In your research, have you left a research question with a shallow search? Have you dug everywhere you can? 

Your ancestors deserve the best researcher, the most passionate story-teller, and the dignity of being remembered. So let's encounter your ancestors through family history and remember the past made present today!

*Photo by Jeremy McKnight on Unsplash